Even on the day after arguably the most ignominious hours of the most ignominious life of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, we in my tribe were still hard at it — perched outside his home (“Are you going to rehab, Rob?”), even door-stopping his mother Diane on the way out of her hair salon.

“Just leave him alone,” was Mrs. Ford’s plea, as if there was a prayer.

I am not at all confident that if and when the poor SOB is finally ensconced at an addiction joint, some enterprising sort won’t try to infiltrate the 12-step group or camp outside the place, hoping for a glimpse of the round pink fellow through a long lens.

It would, of course, be deemed to be in the public interest.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford speaks during the kick off of his re-election campaign at a rally in the city’s north end. (GEOFF ROBINS/AFP/Getty Images)

This is a long way of saying that in this ignoble round of the RoFo storm — wherein the addiction counsellors are again getting face time on the tube, journalists are trying to out-clever one another on Twitter, Toronto city councillors are lining up to “react,” and mayoralty candidates intoning upon the human wreckage while not hesitating to take advantage — the mayor certainly emerges as the most diminished figure, but journalism itself is running a close second.

There is only flotsam and jetsam left of Ford at the moment, as befits the spiralling addict, and it has been so for months.

This week’s one-two-three punch – a Toronto Sun audio of a rant taped at an Etobicoke bar; a Globe and Mail report of another apparent mayoral dive into crack cocaine, with the paper paying $10,000 for photographs from the videos a drug dealer is peddling; the Toronto Star’s report on Ford’s latest foray to a downtown club — merely confirm this.

It all blew up Wednesday night, and duly confronted (in one instance by the Sun’s Joe Warmington, who modestly describes himself as having had the mayor’s “ear” these past months, when I would suggest it was rather a different organ) with evidence of his misdeeds, Ford announced he would leave the campaign for at least 30 days and get professional help.

That wasn’t good enough, for almost anyone it appears, and press and politicians alike carried on as though it was all very shocking.

Yet what did the world learn from any of the latest revelations that the modestly alert observer didn’t already know?

The mayor has a drinking problem? Check. The mayor is prone to lying and denial, particularly about said drinking? Check. The mayor is often out of control when drunk, prone to incoherence, profanity and aggression? Check. The mayor has smoked crack cocaine? Check.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is shown with what appears to be a pipe in an image taken from the Gawker.com website. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Gawker.com)

David Walmsley, the Globe’s new editor-in-chief (and, full disclosure, a beloved former boss), makes a decent argument that without the latest photograph — it shows Mr. Ford smoking what the drug dealer says was crack — it would have been “groundhog day” again.

For more than a year, Walmsley said, public and press “have lived in purgatory, with the public simply not prepared to believe the word of reporters who have viewed material related to the mayor’s behaviour.” The story needed irrefutable proof, he said in an email Thursday, and “the proof was the images and the only way to get the images was to pay for them.”

Walmsley said evidence that the photograph was necessary is that it has already changed the conversation.

Compared with the public debate that followed the Star’s revelation last year of the first crack video featuring the mayor, which was viewed by two Star reporters but not purchased, the discussion now is “a lot less about the media, and more about the individual, and sympathy for him.”

I’m not sure I agree with Walmsley’s analysis. The skepticism about the Star story could just as easily have begun with the public’s recognition of the paper’s longstanding antipathy to Ford, even when he was but a candidate, and been furthered by the genuinely nice human instinct to give a beleaguered guy, at least at first, the benefit of the doubt.

In any case, the skepticism was always relatively narrowly confined and relatively short-lived; in November, Ford finally admitted it himself.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford speaks to the large crowd of media outside his office at Toronto City Hall after Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair announced he has possession of the video allegedly showing the mayor smoking crack cocaine. (Michelle Siu for National Post)

In any case, Walmsley recognized “the sensitivity of my decision” to do business with a drug dealer and said “it is not something done lightly or without a sense of regret. There should be a debate about it. But I believe it was the right thing to do.”

He said the paper is not pursuing any further purchases from the drug dealer.

It wasn’t the first time in the Ford saga that a newspaper has paid for a video, or images from one; the Star did it last fall, when it spent $5,000 for a video showing the mayor in a drunken violent tirade, threatening to kill someone.

At that time, and now, Star editor Michael Cooke (again full disclosure, I’ve worked for Cooke too, and almost worked for him, in various incarnations) defended the purchase by saying that buying such a video is little different from a paper buying traditional photographs.

“If a tornado hit Toronto and someone had good images, we’d pay,” he said in an email Thursday. “Happens somewhere in the journalism world every day. More and more often, in fact, because most everyone has a cam in their pocket.”

It’s not akin to “paying for news,” Cooke said, though he acknowledged “we could be on a slippery slope and so we need to exercise great caution.”

He didn’t directly answer if the Star was trying to buy the videos now being shopped about, but said at one point, “We wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we weren’t actively in pursuit of new videos that we have heard exist of the mayor allegedly misbehaving again.”

About this, he told CP24 Wednesday night, “We think one of the videos is, the rumour is that one of the videos is a sex tape of some kind and if that’s true, then habit or not, the mayor’s finished. But we don’t know that yet. We’re working on it.”

There’s that old slippery slope. As a friend of mine said once, we ought not to confuse the public interest with what the public may be interested in seeing.

Christie Blatchford was born in Quebec and studied journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has written for all four Toronto-based newspapers. She has won a National Newspaper Award for column... read more writing and in 2008 won the Governor-General’s Literary Award in non-fiction for her book Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army.View author's profile